#don't you dare mention “virtual numbers”

[algebraic-dumbass]

do you think people thought of 0 like some people think of i. were they like "a number that represents nothing? sounds fake"

now that i think about it it's kind of the math equivalent of people not believing doctors. "i? sounds fake" is like "vaccines? sounds fake"

[wh4thefnk]

I need to clean out my mind from some observations.

So I finally ventured to see what was the public's opinion about this whole marriage/relationship thing; checking the most viral tweets, the tik tok and instagram commentary; the support is just staggering, I was expecting just a bit more of a push back due to the recent Joe Jonas-Sophie Turner viral discussion. I think these are some of the reasons for that:

1. There's nothing virtually wrong with the age gap and they are both consenting adults; which it's true, I've even said it myself I don't have a problem with the age gap on its own, but the whole context surrounding it, this relationship and most importantly his + the whole portu slags' characters, the general public isn't privy to this context. And overall, the world and specially Hollywood is very accepting with age gaps; plus most of the GP is indifferent and will move on with their day after showing support.

2. It's Chris Evans & Pretty Privilege. I think if it was someone whose looks were less worshipped or a less attractive couple there would be a bit more of a side eye; they are also riding on Captain America's nostalgia, and he has a lot of support coming from there at this special moment in his life; people love to see that the beloved America's boyfriend who has been gushing about family and marriage for years finally found love.

I think those two are the most important reasons.

3. But point 3 is where the joke is at. The smaller number of people who are daring to point out this relationship is icky, or why he and/or she is not that great are immediatley shushed with the you're jealous and slap with the crazy fans narrative, even when they’re just casual observers. The fandom's reputation is playing an important role here, that was going to happen regardless and they were going to use that narrative in their favor, but the joke is fans (I'm talking about the ones who did the flyers, the ones who could not hold themselves together and used to leave nasty comments directly in people's social media connected to this, I'm talking about the fan letter, the scamming) they gave them exactly what they needed, they have examples to quote. The articles about the wedding aren't coming alone, they've been accompanied by articles pointing out the behavior of the fandom, and it has not even been a week. The general public has been put in a postion where they are rooting and sympathizing for this couple, muting any talk about visuals, the age gap, the power imbalance, which I assume is what Chris and his team were fearing the most when going public. Frankly... I am impressed. I said once: do not hand victim cards to people who will not hesitate to use them, and sometimes rightfully so.

I do want to mention If there is a level of concern in this couple's minds about the fandom's behaviour, to everyone's dismay, no one can discard that as completely untrue/unfounded; be completely honest now; some people’s behavior has been absolutely unacceptable, and that’s just the truth.

Now just to tie it all in, I said one of the reasons I knew this relationship was serious it's because Chris' image is one of his biggest assets, if not the biggest; and him and his team were not going to stain it for a lolita hookup much less for a dumb stunt; the optics are not good and that is a fact; I stand by that; well we are in the aftermath of him risking his biggest asset, there has been certain level of backlash at times, he does look like a cliche and everyone, e v e r y o n e deep down knows it, there is a bit of a crack in his brand because of this, but overall It's turned out to be not as drastic as everyone expected; even inside of the fandom; while he has taken a hit ( and you know I think he’s glad the intense fans may be jumping ship) he has a very big chunk of fans still cheering for him; so I think he’s not doing that bad at all.

(This is just me thinking about why the GP is reacting the way they do, I'm not saying Chris isn't insecure about nothing, I'm not saying any loss he’s had don’t and won’t affect him at all, I'm not saying this same support won't turn against them in the future, I'm not saying none of that...)

[luckyowl21]

Okay seriously keep talking about Gorillaz albums and blaseball eras. Is their self titled first album pre-history? Do you have specific song examples for each era?

DGDKHDD THANK YOU KOSMO FOR ENABLING ME

The TLDR version is:

Gorillaz (debut album) is BETA Season 1 (and technically Pre-History)

Demon Days is BETA Seasons 2-5 (Early Discipline Era)

Plastic Beach is BETA Seasons 6-10 (Late Discipline Era)

The Fall is BETA Seasons 11-12 (Early Expansion Era)

Humanz is BETA Seasons 13-19 (Mid Expansion Era)

The Now Now is BETA Seasons 20-24 (Late Expansion Era)

Cracker Island is GAMMA Seasons 1-2 (Coronation Era)

BONUS: Song Machine: Season 1 (Strange Timez) is Short Circuits

Gonna put my reasoning and highlight songs for this under the Read More cut because this is gonna be obscenely long (I'm having my Cynda moment /affectionate). Also yadda yadda "this is from my perspective and flavoured with my experience with Blaseball" you're welcome to disagree just don't eat me for my thoughts:

PRE-HISTORY + BETA SEASON 1 = GORILLAZ

Yes, their self-titled debut album “Gorillaz” fits Pre-History, but I’d argue that it follows the Beta Season 1 to a T. Bombastic, eclectic in its style, blending the familiar with the new (Baseball but Absurdist Horror | Alt. Rock but not by “real musicians”), it’s fresh look and feel was what drew people in and caught their eyes on this funny little band. The very nature of Gorillaz is that of satire; I mean, a British virtual band that's made up of drawings as their members with cartoonishly outrageous personalities? That's peak MTV right there! How could you NOT make fun at that vapid vision of commercial art? Blaseball's nature is very similar to that; a fake baseball league that are really just a bunch of names and teams "playing" against each other with just the fans here to bet. Management are unknown massive forces that we laypeople could Never comprehend, be it a massive corporation with vetted interests or a Forbidden Book.

Highlight songs include “Clint Eastwood” and “Tomorrow Comes Today” for The Book opening and what little we understood of Pre-History (namely Parker, old teams remixed/returned, and weather) being brought back in a “brand new way” respectively.

EARLY DISCIPLINE ERA = DEMON DAYS

“Demon Days” Is the Disciple Era, more specifically Beta Seasons 2-5. The stage is set, the stakes have been raised about what Blaseball-Gorillaz are about in their respective worlds, and by gods they Will Deliver on those stakes! “Demon Days” has a special place in my heart, not only because that was the album that made me fall in love with Gorillaz as a band and as an art form, but also one of the very first fanart of Blaseball I ever made was the Temperate Sea Monkeys (Ziwa, Mooney, Hobbes, and Richmond) album as a parody of Demon Days! Not to mention the overall apocalyptic vibe the whole album has and the way it speaks to the horrors of war and violence in such a smooth mysterious way really captures how hectic early DE was. This early era was also most likely what got people interested in Blaseball to begin with, which is why it pairs with this album so well.

While the highlight songs are "El Mañana" and "Every Planet We Reach is Dead" for mourning the players we've lost in these early stages (especially Jaylen Hotdogfingers) and the general horror and angst, I have a few songs to highlight each season from this album: ‘O Green World’ and ‘November has Come’ are very Season 2 with the feeling of trying to comprehend the enormity of what opening the Forbidden Book entails and acknowledging there's no going back, ‘Dirty Harry’ and ‘Fire Coming Out Of The Monkey’s Head’ fits the horror of realizing that anyone could die and all you have is a giant peanut demanding you follow it's whims (in a narrative sense) for Season 3. Either ‘DARE’ or ‘All Alone’ is Season 4 with their plucky dance numbers via Feedback’s sudden shifts in humorous ("Thomas Dracaena hits a ground out to Edric Tosser") and often times painful ways.

And of course I'd put "Feel Good Inc" for Season 5, it's not only one of my favourite tracks of the album that's the season I joined Blaseball lol. Okay in all seriousness, Season 5 is peak "Demon Days" and "Feel Good Inc.", because by now the fans have a "handle" on what Blaseball is about and have been able to come together to root for their teams and to lift other teams up. It's the community that really what makes Blaseball what it was, and "Feel Good Inc." especially champions these connections while "Demon Days" adds the edge of trying to break bread while still adhering to the natural "rivalries" formed in sports games.

LATE DISCIPLINE ERA = PLASTIC BEACH

Ahh Plastic Beach, by far the biggest album Gorillaz ever released (not counting future albums). With so many iconic bangers and collabs, the cohesive theme of environmentalism, the intensity from their music videos, the very fact they had a whole-ass interactive website chock-full of Gorillaz lore, Plastic Beach is a Behemoth that you just Had To Be There to really Get It (side note: I highly recommend this video by Lady Emily if you wanna learn more). And with the power of hindsight, that's the exact vibe that Late Discipline Era holds over Blaseball. From iconic moments like the Necromancy, the Idol Board, Ruby Tuesday, Day X and the Death of the Shelled One, like how Plastic Beach's music videos brought about massive changes to the band members' lives so to did the Late Discipline Era to Blaseball as a whole.

It's difficult to limit songs into seasons in this case, because of how cohesive this album is, so for this list I shall go over iconic moments and have their highlight songs.

Season 6's Idol Board and subsequent Third Strike is giving "Sweepstakes" and "To Binge" for somewhat obvious reasons (To Binge especially for it's direct reference to how the Idol Board was ultimately used to generate more coins for votes. An economy if you will). The Necromancy of Jaylen is "Empire Ants", especially in light of hubris and on how Jaylen ultimately had to Keep Playing even if it hurt everyone in the league.

Season 7's Ruby Tuesday is "Rhinestone Eyes" especially for the allusion to the Rouge Umps' eyes glowing before the slaughter. Snackrifice and the Moist One Monitor's appearances is "Superfast Jellyfish" for their connections to food as well as how the Monitor has a special fascination towards "tiny eggs".

Season 8's emergence of the Receivers is "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach" for notably Snoop Dogg's verses, while Jaylen's debt fits either "White Flag" or "Broken" ("White Flag" mirroring how Flickering sends players to different teams with little-to-no warning, and "Broken" for the angst of being an idolized dead player with a complicated relationship with the fans).

Season 9's Day X is "Stylo" for it's bombastic yet fearful edge that colours the experience of witnessing the Shoe Thieves get into a literal boss fight against the PODS.

Rounding it off with the fall of the Shelled One and freeing the PODS being "On Melancholy Hill" for the juxtaposition of The Biggest Boss Fight (of the time) being met with the cool confidence of the Hall Stars!

And of course, Workman Gloom (my beloved)'s iconic incineration and later revival as one of the Hall Stars is to the tune of "Glitter Freeze", an intense and shining number highlighting Gloom's badass exit as a living Talker and his iconic hommer in Day X as a Hall Star.

EARLY EXPANSION ERA + COFFEE CUP = THE FALL

So Expansion Era, especially Coffee Cup is kind of a weird moment in Blaseball, much like The Fall's release. On one hand, it was following the end of Discipline Era, we killed a god and have new larger figures, hubris and excitement we at an all-time high! But on the other hand... there's a certain flavour to the Forbidden Book as we chewed on it's pages, something that hinted towards a shift. The mini-hiatus between Eras really solidify that sense of trepidation, as well as the concept that something else is cooking behind the scenes. The Fall very much fits that post-intense rush that still felt fresh but... was it really Gorillaz if its just Damon Albarn? Is it really Blaseball when there's really low stakes?

There's not a lot of songs that I can really say are standouts from this album, but "Revolving Doors" seems like a close enough to count as the highlight for this particularly short instance. How it feels like it's something familiar but with the seemingly never-ending cycle of more upgrades, more expectations, more more more...

MID-EXPANSION ERA = HUMANZ

After 7 long years of no Gorillaz due to Albarn and Hewitt's fall out, Finally they came back together to continue Gorillaz, ushering a brand new era of Gorillaz music with the highly anticipated album "Humanz"! And it was..... controversial let's say. Don't get me wrong, it was a powerful and genuinely fun album, coming right off the heels of the 2016 American election, with the style and charisma that Gorillaz is eponymous for, but there was just SO MUCH going on that it's hard to truly nail down the vibes. It was emotional, it was a huge force of return, it was paraoxically overt in it's political leanings despite doing it's damnest to avoid any direct links, it was Enhanced Party Time. Ask any Gorillaz fan what they think about Humanz and you'll get a different answer each time. Mid-Expansion Era is the epitome of Humanz, for better and for worse. It leaned into the theme of Expanding with it's plethora of new mechanics and the abundance of Blaseball shenanigans (Sutton Bishop's Necromancy, Player Redactions, The Library, and the Replicas to name a few), but fans could now see there's too much going on to hold onto team spirit. When I was a Talkers rep, I remember witnessing team squabbles over Wills, and felt that the community was larger and more fractured than ever. And yet, there was always a through-line of hope and yearning for freedom within this era, one of the most Human(z) experiences one could ever encounter in a game like Blaseball.

The overall highlight song of this era is definitively "Hallelujah Money"; it's haunting melody and sombre lyrics heralding the pitfalls of late-stage capitalism, tinged with this era's overwhelming presence of The Boss, the warnings of history being repeated through the Reader and Lootcrates, and how this particular vision of Blaseball saw more hunger for coins through AYCE and the snacks bar.

I could go into how each song in Humanz fits each season, but that genuinely would take up all my brain-power, so if anyone's curious, send an ask over to get those details.

I WILL SAY HOWEVER THAT THE TALKERS WINNING THE CHAMPIONSHIP WITH 100% CLOWN RATE??? "CARNIVAL", AND I WILL NOT ELABORATE.

LATE EXPANSION ERA = THE NOW NOW

Okay, you've read this far along so I gotta confess something here; I initially chose The Now Now to be for BETA Season 20, solely for the joke of how it was referred to as "Win(Win)". But upon relistening to the album, it actually suits Late Expansion Era better than I expected! The Now Now was introspective, cynical of what it has witnessed in the heights of fame yet it treasures what it has experienced. It rouses one to reflect on what has happened, what we can learn, and how to finally find one's self from the miasma of the past. Late Expansion Era of Blaseball had a certain drive to break out, to honour the previous arcs and usher in a new era that would hopefully bring forth stability. Much like how in Gorillaz lore during this album, where the rest of the band and 2-D especially finally explore what it's like to breathe without Murdoch, the League opens up to the concept of ridding the Expansions and hold onto the core of Blaseball; just teams playing blall.

The overarching highlight song is "Humility", but highlight songs for specific events include: "Idaho" for when Jesús finally set off on his journey with the Fifth Base, "Tranz" for just... all of the painful revelations about Parker McMillains' connections to Pre-History and to the game as a whole, "Sorcererz" is for the leadup and subsequent Semi-Centennial game, "One Percent" fitting Parker standing up for himself and the League and addressing the multiple planes of existence to rally against the Boss, the death of the Boss is "Fireflies", and rounding out the era with Blaseball being swallowed up in the BlackHole(BlackHole) is "Souk Eye". A solid ending track for a solid conclusion to Blaseball! We will always think of it... but who is to say Blaseball has truly ended?

SHORT CIRCUITS = SONG MACHINE (STRANGE TIMEZ)

Song Machine Season One (Strange Timez) is a weird album for me; not for it's lack of charm, oh no it had Plenty. It's weird because honestly I see it more like a side-project that the Gorillaz band had done just for funsies rather than a studio album, despite it being classified as such. Most of the tracks had a music video accompanying it, feeding us lore on what the band's been up to post-Humanz; truly it was like bringing back the old-school Gorillaz without being old hat. Short Circuits fits that weird niche of bringing back old Blaseball in terms of speed and shenanigans, but with a MUCH faster pace. I'm still not sure how I feel about Short Circuits, much like my feelings for Strange Timez.

I genuinely can't really pick a highlight song for this era, but I highly recommend giving the album a listen! For what it's worth, my favourite track in the album is "Désolé", it just hits different to me.

CORONATION ERA = CRACKER ISLAND

I think I speak for a fair number of Blaseball fans that we were Not expecting it to come back after Expansion Era. I mean, it was a solid ending! Sure there's a bunch of open questions left behind, especially after the Short Circuits, but it was still a good place to end! It's been months since the last update! Where could we even go from here? But there was still whispers in the street; why let go of something that was so good? Why let go of such a powerful phenomena that has a passionate fan-base? *You could make a religion out of this*

Okay, silly monologue aside, Blaseball really did take the internet by storm during the pandemic; so many people from the most unlikely corners of the globe found this silly website through either word of mouth or through sheer boredom, took a chance on it, joined the Main Discord, and then proceeded to be immersed in a community so large and talented that it spawned art challenges, whole-ass bands with albums (I still miss you Temperate Sea Monkeys), collaborative zines, a volunteer-run unofficial merch store that (BB)Cared, podcasts, countless fics and fanart in countless mediums and even made it to national news in Canada! There was so much potential to run towards, but that doesn't mean it was without it's drawbacks and criticisms, which for the purposes of this post I don't wanna get into. Coronation Era was poised to fill in the massive shoes that Expansion Era and Disciple Era left behind... and we will never know how would it fill it, as the era was cut short as it was no longer sustainable to continue.

So why would Cracker Island fit this era? The album was a rousing success! Besides, it had a critical view on social media, and that's not what Coronation Era could focus on! It fits because well... it fits in Blaseball's tenuous grasp on its audience, and it's desperation for funding in order to go all out in its marketing. Unlike previous albums that had plenty of funds to really push the idea of the Gorillaz being a "real" band despite being cartoon characters through it's blending of projections in live tours in Demon Days and through interactive websites like Plastic Beach and even an AR app for Humanz (to name a few)… Cracker Island just had a few short videos and 3 main music videos. I may sound a bit ungrateful here, but in contrast to previous albums' bombastic marketing and ease of accessibility to their characters' stories, this album had very little to go off of.

You'd have to have been an ardent die-hard Gorillaz connoisseur to keep up, and ngl I wasn't able to. I was moving on with life, listening to other music. Much like how I was slowly drifting away from Blaseball through the long hiatuses, barely acknowledging the updates while I hung out with the friends I made with the Talkers and reconnected with irl friends old and new. So when the album released and when the Coronation Era began, naturally I rushed to welcome it, but by then I have changed. I held them differently the way I had a mere few years ago. Maybe it's a sign of growing up and changing with the times. Maybe it was the long hours of trying to keep up finally catching up. I'm not sure what it was... but it felt like an overdue farewell. A gentle nudge reassuring that the future is still there to embrace, and that the people you've met and have been inspired by will still be there, even if the thing that brought you all together isn't there anymore. The band will keep playing. It's okay to let go.

Highlight songs are: "The Tired Influencer" for it's emotional lyrics that really fits the long waits and slow cold realization that Blaseball may not come back inbetween seasons and stubbornly hoping that it's not true despite the UI issues and website crashes; and "Baby Queen", for how much of an impact Blaseball had on me and on so many other Fans over the years. How it helped us grow as creatives and as people. We are all love Blaseball... and I think some corner of our hearts will still love Blaseball for years to come.

[epicspheal]

(Continued) Aaand I ran out of space. Tumblr glitches so I hope it didn't do anything weird to the ask, but I guess my inquiry was what your favorite portrayal on her character was, and how you got the confidence in your AU :0

Hi, there anon! I am assuming you're the leaf anon from earlier. It's interesting how the Tumblr ask character count limits vary between anon and user asks! But yeah as I mentioned in the previous ask, I don't know much about Leaf as I've just really gotten into her character thanks to Pokemon Masters. So I'd say that would be my favorite portrayal of her (and thusly cactusverse!Leaf is built off of her masters personality much like cactusverse!Red and cactusverse!Blue's lore is inspired by masters). I like that she seems to be on par with Red and Blue and I really hope we get to see more of her in the future villain arc Now as far as my confidence in my pokeverse...LOL it took me a LONG while to gain any sort of confidence in putting this out there. And I'm not going to pretend that I don't still have my doubts on a constant basis. I started really getting into writing (both fanfic and original fic) during the mid 00's when mary sue tests were all the rage and comment sections were rife with people ready to jump down your throat if your OC even showed the barest hint of specialness. Teenage Spheal would not have dared come up with cactusverse let alone put this out on a blog...or even have a blog LMAO. But really I think being bold/vulnerable enough to just talk to other people about my ideas. Most of this happened on discord and my AU has undergone a massive number of revisions in the past two years that it's virtually unrecognizable from the original concept. But talking with others, RPing some of characters, writing things out (some of which is shared on AO3, some just shared on discord) slowly gave me the courage to put my AU on this blog!

[ceasarslegion]

I have debilitating ADHD. It is extremely difficult for me to function when I'm off my meds, and unfortunately, I'm off my meds because my town pharmacy won't take my goddamn prescription. Luckily, I don't have to worry about work for the time being. But that doesn't mean having nothing to do is necessarily a good thing. It's a double-edged sword: imagine an overactive mind running at a million miles an hour and Demanding stimulus when you have... no stimulus to give it. You just sit there vibrating and running in place and being driven up the bloody wall while the bad part of time blindness kicks in and makes the seconds feel like hours. So what do I do?

I play video games. I play lots, and lots, of video games. It's something interesting and fun to focus on, I can shift into hyperfocus and make the time go by faster so I don't feel trapped, it satisfies my need for stimulus, gives me tasks, rewards, problems to solve, everything. Elder Scrolls lore has given me something to take joy and interest out of, and renewed other hobbies like art and writing because I wanna draw the perfect madness of the Shivering Isles and write about my character's adventures in Morrowind. It's perfect.

And I love to read, don't get me wrong. I have stacks of fantasy and sci fi books, but I implore you to try to read a novel when you're unmedicated. Brain no care if it's gonna be interesting in 5 pages, if it's not interesting now, goodbye. It fucking sucks, man. I just wanna read Trials of Apollo and Discworld, but I can't even get through one paragraph right now. It's so bad because of the lack of multi-sensory stimulus, that I was gonna order the rest of the Witcher books, but I decided against it because at this rate what's the point?

But video games really hit that for me. They're perfect for me right now. So I play them, lots and lots and lots. But... that makes me uncreative, doesn't it? I don't have a real hobby, it's just video games. Real creative types can read the books they genuinely enjoy without assistance! And honestly, playing that many games just makes me an unhealthy slob, and all that joy and accomplishment I feel from finally destroying an insanely difficult Dark Souls boss or winning a difficult interrogation scene in LA Noire is just sad, isn't it? Isn't it sad that someone jumps up and genuinely gives a little cheer of victory at something virtual?

I don't neflect my other responsibilities. It's not an addiction. And it's also not something that's inherently lesser than my hobbies that generate something. This culture of putting down certain things just because you feel superior in the number of books you've read or how many paintings you've put up on your walls in the last week is, dare I say it, shitty and harmful. I felt genuine shame for playing Heavy Rain until 2am the other night as if being so positively invested and engaged in something ultimately harmless that I lose track of the time and go "woah, holy shit" when I check the time because I coulda sworn it was 10pm 5 minutes ago is a bad thing that reflects poorly on my character.

Not to mention that if you treat such hobbies as lesser than kids don't want to engage in the ones you deem superior. It sounds paradoxical, but it's true. Like, you force a kid to stop playing games and force them into piano lessons instead, they will hate piano, hate you for putting them through that, and reinforce the thought that games are the only hobby they genuinely enjoy.

Y'all... gotta stop with this shit, man. Just... stop. Let people enjoy things. No hobby is inherently better or worse than others just because it generates something or seems more passive than others. I only got back into drawing and writing recently because gaming opened that avenue back up to me by getting rid of my crushing mental block, and those things being connected to each other is more common than you think.

I don't know, this probably reads like gibberish, but it's what I got to say on the matter.

Very cool of society to deem certain hobbies as inherently lesser than others just because of the medium they're on 😔👌

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Shovel Knight is a game that embraces the look of NES classics, but has some major differences when examined closely. When setting out to develop the game's aesthetic and play style, we at Yacht Club Games had a few goals in mind. Instead of emulating the NES exactly, we would create a rose-tinted view of an 8-bit game.

What if development for the NES never stopped? How would an 8-bit game feel and play if developed today? We imagined the gameplay would benefit from modern design lessons, and the tech would receive subtle but substantial upgrades. This was possible to an extent on the NES, where technology was built into the cartridges.

Later NES games like Super Mario Bros. 3 packed cartridge tech that was vastly improved from early NES titles like the original Super Mario Bros. Different chipsets allowed for features like diagonal scrolling, larger sprites, or (unique to the Japanese Famicom, as detailed below) additional sound channels. Compounded with improved techniques and understanding of the hardware, the difference between early and late-life NES games can be staggering.

                We imagined that perhaps some cartridge advancements would allow for the techniques displayed in Shovel Knight. We also broke some NES limitations purely out of preference... we decided to eliminate any drawback that would hamstring the gameplay experience.  One example is sprite flickering, which occurred when the NES tried to display more than 8 sprites per horizontal line. This effect is nostalgic for some, but we felt it was detrimental, so we nixed it. However, we did make gameplay design decisions based on the idea of sprite flickering: we tried to avoid cluttering the screen with onscreen objects, and limited things like particle effects.  Being aware of the rules in this case led to the game feeling clear and simple; one of the hallmarks of a great NES game.

There are many more examples, so let’s go into more detail on how we bent the rules of the NES!

Modern Hardware! Console and PC Versions!  We aren’t on the NES!

Shovel Knight runs natively on modern hardware, and cannot run on NES hardware. This surprised some people who took our NES intentions quite literally, with some players hoping to play Shovel Knight on a homebrew NES flash cartridge.

The truth is that Shovel Knight is quite a complex game, capable of running on many hardware platforms and configurations. On the current-gen Nintendo platforms, Shovel Knight supports some unique wireless and internet features using Nintendo's Miiverse and Streetpass functionality. Third party middleware like FMOD audio and SDL controller support were also integrated.

Widescreen 16:9 display (or 5:3 on the 3DS)

Part of our modern upgrade was extending the viewable screen space, avoiding the black bars you would see in an NES virtual console game.  This meant displaying our game at the 16:9 resolution native to most modern displays.  While we did change our aspect resolution, we didn’t change the resolution in terms of making Shovel Knight a pixel-dense HD game.

Instead, each Shovel Knight pixel is really 4.5x4.5 pixels at 1080p, giving a virtual resolution of 400×240. An NES outputs at 256×240, giving us the same viewable vertical resolution. Our background tiles (like most NES games) are 16×16 in size, and we have the same number of vertical tiles as an NES game. Keeping the vertical and tile size dimensions were important to us in order to match the gameplay feel of NES titles. The only difference is additional horizontal space, which we thought was a great addition, allowing extra room in level design for puzzles, objects, and breathing room.

Background parallax

Background parallax scrolling is the ability to shift different layers or parts of the screen at different rates, giving 2D layers the appearance of 3D movement. Imagine watching out the side window of the car on a highway: the mountains far away don't appear to move at all, while the posts whiz by very quickly.  The beginning of our first trailer gives a taste of the effect. This advanced effect is much more typical of the SNES. It was possible on the NES, but only with a lot of trickery.  Programmers had a couple of options: 

Early on with Shovel Knight, we decided to amp up the parallax scrolling, creating an average of 5-6 layers of backgrounds to scroll by. This felt like the next technological step the NES would make so it didn't feel out of place to us.  More importantly, adding the effect made the gameplay layer more readable. There was another great benefit to having so many layers: we could really take advantage of the 3DS’ eye-popping stereoscopic effects!

Sprite Flickering

Sprite flickering on the NES would occur when more than 8 sprites were displayed on the same horizontal line.  We kept the sprite count as low as we could, but as previously mentioned, we didn't sweat the exact numbers. Some of our objects produce a few more particles than an NES game would dare… but we thought it was worth the beauty.

Some games like Recca or Contra got around sprite limits by displaying certain sprites only every other frame (at 30fps instead of 60fps). On CRT monitors running low resolution interlaced video, objects would appear to be drawn every frame. In addition to this, NES particle art was often built with flickering in mind for effects like explosions. We used flashing sprites in some situations to replace alpha transparency; For example, Shovel Knight flashes on and off during his "invincible" state, after being hit. So overall, this didn't feel like an important restriction to follow, unless it made the gameplay not feel like NES gameplay.

Color Palette Additions

The NES was only capable of spitting out 54 different colors... and that's not a lot. The problem for us mainly came in trying to display a gradient in most hues. For example, there isn’t a very useful yellow, the darker spectrum of color is very underrepresented, and there aren’t many shades that work for displaying a character with a darker skin tone. Sticking to the NES palette was a big priority for us, though, as it gives a very distinctive look. In the end, we ended up with only a few extra colors.

For more info on NES colors, check out this wiki: http://ift.tt/1lVWEuV

The dark purple here is #22123B

So what are the colors of our shame? In this shot from Treasure Knight’s stage, you can see the dark purple details in the ground. Once added, this purple was used elsewhere, mainly as a bridge between black and the cooler colors of any given background.

The deep red hue is #360900

Similarly to the purple, we needed a color to bridge the gap from black to our warmer colors. This dark red shows up prominently in Mole Knight’s stage, The Lost City. You won’t see this red as commonly used as the purple, because the NES palette leans heavily toward cool colors. Famously, Mega Man was conceived of as a red robot, but was changed to blue after the developers saw the spectrum.

The beige cloak is #9E9E5C

This next cheater color was actually the first created. We needed a color for the sheepskin cloak that Polar Knight wears and none of the colors in the NES palette really fit the bill. This beige is also used for his skin and to keep things in theming with the rest of the level. We actually intended to go back and fix this beige since it is the only place in the whole game that it’s used, but nothing we tried ever worked. In the end we just decided to leave it.

This villager sports: #824e00

The final cheater color was needed to help make the cast of Shovel Knight more diverse. The default NES color palette provides very few tools to create a character with darker skin tones. This was especially problematic when doing the “Pixel My Face” Kickstarter rewards (at a certain pledge tier, backers are immortalized as portraits in the game) since we had backers from all corners of the earth. So our final cheater color is the light brown that gives shade to this fellow's face!

Number of Colors Per Sprite

Sprites on the NES were limited to 4 colors (or 3 colors + transparency) as you can see with the sprite characters in The Legend of Zelda screenshot on the right.

Some developers created more colorful sprites using another trick. Characters like Mega Man were constructed out of two sprites, one for his body (blue, light blue, and black) and one for his face (beige, white, and black), and the sprites were overlaid. This is why Mega Man’s face will flicker separately from his body sometimes. For Shovel Knight, we decided to treat most sprites like Mega Man, and give them 4-5 colors to work with in addition to transparency.

Getting this balance right was a tricky process, as a character with too many colors stuck out like a sore thumb. We worked back and forth with detail levels and colors until we found a combo that looked great.

A sprite too detailed is also really hard to animate!

  In this example, you can see the original King Knight design. While the left sprite has only 5 colors (as was our stated limitation), it was too detailed and almost felt closer to a 16 bit sprite. After taking a few passes to simplify the shapes for readability and simplicity, we ended up with the sprite that you see in game!

Multiple Color Palettes Simultaneously

Although every sprite in Shovel Knight is created using limited colors, we didn't make all sprites onscreen abide by a single color palette.  To cite Mega Man again as an example, the player's sprite color changes also affect 1-Ups and other items. This is due to a uniform color palette; when a color is adjusted for one sprite, all sprites change color. We chose to not worry about this limitation as the headache to make one palette work doesn't benefit gameplay, but we did use limited color palettes to create enemy variants and for cycling damage and explosion effects.

Those effects made gameplay more clear and exciting; for example, cycling damage made it obvious you were hurting an enemy as the effect was consistent across all objects and added fun as the color cycling was more impactful than your typical 'gethit' animation or flickering. These palette cycling and shifting effects were created by passing an indexed unsigned byte texture representing the sprite and a full 32 bit color texture representing the palette to a pixel shader...quite the leap from 8-bit technology to imitate the good old days!

To see the limits of palette effects, check out this site, which shows the amazing animations you can create by cycling a single color palette.

Memory Limitations

An NES cart could only hold so much information: code, animations, backgrounds, text, music, and everything else had to fit into 32k of memory, although this was expanded greatly through the use of on-cartridge chips called memory mappers, which became essential as more advanced graphics and special effects required ROM sizes as large as 4-6 megabits (0.5 ~ 0.75 MB). Shovel Knight weighs in at almost 1.2 gigabits (about 150 MB - most of which is .mp3s). Because we didn't have to fit onto a small cartridge, the extreme optimization and data compression required for that wasn't necessary, and we were able to focus our technical efforts on gameplay systems and stability.

Our composer and sound designer Jake 'Virt' Kaufman likes to remind us that the soundtrack, when compiled into authentic machine code (see below) will fit nicely into the 6 megabit Kirby's Adventure cartridge, but only if all graphics and gameplay code are removed first.

Big Sprites

The sprite hardware on the NES was not optimal for drawing very large moving objects, due to the limitations it imposed (after all, even a few small ones could cause flickering).  To get around this limitation, clever developers displayed big art as animated background tile layers.  That is the reason why, whenever you fight a large enemy on the NES, they are usually on a black screen with no background art. The boss is the background.

We thought that the black background with the huge boss always gave NES games a distinctive and epic feel, where the focus was just on you and your enemy, so we decided it was important to keep. However, lacking sprite limitations, we didn't need to mess with background layers or other workarounds to make a large sprite possible.  We simply used our animated sprite code, were careful with the designs, and made sure the sprite was on a black (or very dark) background.

Camera shakes

Shaking the camera to show a powerful rumble is a time-honored videogame effect. On the NES, camera shakes only occurred on a single axis. Pay attention next time you see Bowser smashing the ground in the final encounter in Super Mario Bros 3 . This has to do with the NES’s difficulties doing diagonal scrolling.  And this is something we broke, because we didn’t find a compelling reason to keep it.

HUD as a Layer

One oddity of NES games is that sprites usually draw in front of the HUD. On the NES, most HUDs were drawn on the background layer. This is because there was only 1 layer, so the background and HUD had to share. In many cases, the memory mapper chips that enabled large ROM sizes also contained special timing hardware to support "split screen" status bars, but the background layer was still just a background, and sprites were drawn over it. So, if the player was able to reach the top of the screen, the HUD would be covered up by their sprite. Occasionally, this behavior was used as a gameplay mechanic, as secrets or paths could be hidden in such "unreachable" screen space. We love this quirk, and stuck to it as best we could, but sometimes the layering got too weird, and we had to change a few instances on a case by case basis.

Sound Limitations

The music is probably the most authentically NES part of Shovel Knight, although it might seem more lush and full than you'd expect for a NES game. That’s because it is written to use a special memory mapper / sound chip called the VRC6, which was used in several Konami games toward the end of the NES era. This chip allows for advanced graphical techniques, but most famously adds 3 additional sound channels, giving the music much more richness and depth. However, external sound chips such as the VRC6 only worked on the Japanese Famicom, as the Western NES lacked the necessary cartridge connections, so it's an unfamiliar sound to most western gamers. Compare the music in the US version of Castlevania III with the Japanese release, Akumajou Densetsu; the difference is striking.

  Composer Jake Kaufman went about creating Shovel Knight’s music and sound effects using a freely available program called Famitracker. Famitracker exports music in NES machine code, which is capable of running on an actual NES or Famicom console, with all of its limitations and hardware quirks. We finalized the audio using mastering tools (EQ and compression) to give it some extra punch on today’s sound equipment, but avoided using reverb effects or stereo mixing, which would destroy the raw character of the sounds. Any echoes or special effects you hear are programmed note-by-note, the way they were on the NES.  Here's a video of Jake demoing the complexities of a couple tracks created in Famitracker for Shovel Knight.

Another limitation of the NES was that sound effects would often cause one of the audio channels to drop out.  The NES shared the same 5 basic channels for both music and sounds, so the SFX would temporarily steal one or more of the music channels in order to be played. This effect is not present in Shovel Knight - the sound effects are simply layered on top of the music, which is completely inauthentic, but much nicer to listen to.

The next time you boot up an NES game, though, listen closely and notice how most games will drop out the bass, drums, or harmony to the melody in order to pack in more sound effects.

When you add up all the changes, it seems like there is a vast gulf between Shovel Knight and the technology of the NES. However, we feel that the core of the aesthetics of the 8-bit era has been respected, and perhaps even enhanced!

Shovel Knight was a dream project, allowing us to explore a style of game that's rarely seen today. It was fascinating to try and problem-solve the technical issues of yesteryear while avoiding any pitfalls that would belie real modernity. We hope that by being true to the NES in more than just superficial ways, we've built fanciful rock-solid fundamentals.��

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Shovel Knight is a game that embraces the look of NES classics, but has some major differences when examined closely. When setting out to develop the game's aesthetic and play style, we at Yacht Club Games had a few goals in mind. Instead of emulating the NES exactly, we would create a rose-tinted view of an 8-bit game.

What if development for the NES never stopped? How would an 8-bit game feel and play if developed today? We imagined the gameplay would benefit from modern design lessons, and the tech would receive subtle but substantial upgrades. This was possible to an extent on the NES, where technology was built into the cartridges.

Later NES games like Super Mario Bros. 3 packed cartridge tech that was vastly improved from early NES titles like the original Super Mario Bros. Different chipsets allowed for features like diagonal scrolling, larger sprites, or (unique to the Japanese Famicom, as detailed below) additional sound channels. Compounded with improved techniques and understanding of the hardware, the difference between early and late-life NES games can be staggering.

                We imagined that perhaps some cartridge advancements would allow for the techniques displayed in Shovel Knight. We also broke some NES limitations purely out of preference... we decided to eliminate any drawback that would hamstring the gameplay experience.  One example is sprite flickering, which occurred when the NES tried to display more than 8 sprites per horizontal line. This effect is nostalgic for some, but we felt it was detrimental, so we nixed it. However, we did make gameplay design decisions based on the idea of sprite flickering: we tried to avoid cluttering the screen with onscreen objects, and limited things like particle effects.  Being aware of the rules in this case led to the game feeling clear and simple; one of the hallmarks of a great NES game.

There are many more examples, so let’s go into more detail on how we bent the rules of the NES!

Modern Hardware! Console and PC Versions!  We aren’t on the NES!

Shovel Knight runs natively on modern hardware, and cannot run on NES hardware. This surprised some people who took our NES intentions quite literally, with some players hoping to play Shovel Knight on a homebrew NES flash cartridge.

The truth is that Shovel Knight is quite a complex game, capable of running on many hardware platforms and configurations. On the current-gen Nintendo platforms, Shovel Knight supports some unique wireless and internet features using Nintendo's Miiverse and Streetpass functionality. Third party middleware like FMOD audio and SDL controller support were also integrated.

Widescreen 16:9 display (or 5:3 on the 3DS)

Part of our modern upgrade was extending the viewable screen space, avoiding the black bars you would see in an NES virtual console game.  This meant displaying our game at the 16:9 resolution native to most modern displays.  While we did change our aspect resolution, we didn’t change the resolution in terms of making Shovel Knight a pixel-dense HD game.

Instead, each Shovel Knight pixel is really 4.5x4.5 pixels at 1080p, giving a virtual resolution of 400×240. An NES outputs at 256×240, giving us the same viewable vertical resolution. Our background tiles (like most NES games) are 16×16 in size, and we have the same number of vertical tiles as an NES game. Keeping the vertical and tile size dimensions were important to us in order to match the gameplay feel of NES titles. The only difference is additional horizontal space, which we thought was a great addition, allowing extra room in level design for puzzles, objects, and breathing room.

Background parallax

Background parallax scrolling is the ability to shift different layers or parts of the screen at different rates, giving 2D layers the appearance of 3D movement. Imagine watching out the side window of the car on a highway: the mountains far away don't appear to move at all, while the posts whiz by very quickly.  The beginning of our first trailer gives a taste of the effect. This advanced effect is much more typical of the SNES. It was possible on the NES, but only with a lot of trickery.  Programmers had a couple of options: 

Early on with Shovel Knight, we decided to amp up the parallax scrolling, creating an average of 5-6 layers of backgrounds to scroll by. This felt like the next technological step the NES would make so it didn't feel out of place to us.  More importantly, adding the effect made the gameplay layer more readable. There was another great benefit to having so many layers: we could really take advantage of the 3DS’ eye-popping stereoscopic effects!

Sprite Flickering

Sprite flickering on the NES would occur when more than 8 sprites were displayed on the same horizontal line.  We kept the sprite count as low as we could, but as previously mentioned, we didn't sweat the exact numbers. Some of our objects produce a few more particles than an NES game would dare… but we thought it was worth the beauty.

Some games like Recca or Contra got around sprite limits by displaying certain sprites only every other frame (at 30fps instead of 60fps). On CRT monitors running low resolution interlaced video, objects would appear to be drawn every frame. In addition to this, NES particle art was often built with flickering in mind for effects like explosions. We used flashing sprites in some situations to replace alpha transparency; For example, Shovel Knight flashes on and off during his "invincible" state, after being hit. So overall, this didn't feel like an important restriction to follow, unless it made the gameplay not feel like NES gameplay.

Color Palette Additions

The NES was only capable of spitting out 54 different colors... and that's not a lot. The problem for us mainly came in trying to display a gradient in most hues. For example, there isn’t a very useful yellow, the darker spectrum of color is very underrepresented, and there aren’t many shades that work for displaying a character with a darker skin tone. Sticking to the NES palette was a big priority for us, though, as it gives a very distinctive look. In the end, we ended up with only a few extra colors.

For more info on NES colors, check out this wiki: http://ift.tt/1lVWEuV

The dark purple here is #22123B

So what are the colors of our shame? In this shot from Treasure Knight’s stage, you can see the dark purple details in the ground. Once added, this purple was used elsewhere, mainly as a bridge between black and the cooler colors of any given background.

The deep red hue is #360900

Similarly to the purple, we needed a color to bridge the gap from black to our warmer colors. This dark red shows up prominently in Mole Knight’s stage, The Lost City. You won’t see this red as commonly used as the purple, because the NES palette leans heavily toward cool colors. Famously, Mega Man was conceived of as a red robot, but was changed to blue after the developers saw the spectrum.

The beige cloak is #9E9E5C

This next cheater color was actually the first created. We needed a color for the sheepskin cloak that Polar Knight wears and none of the colors in the NES palette really fit the bill. This beige is also used for his skin and to keep things in theming with the rest of the level. We actually intended to go back and fix this beige since it is the only place in the whole game that it’s used, but nothing we tried ever worked. In the end we just decided to leave it.

This villager sports: #824e00

The final cheater color was needed to help make the cast of Shovel Knight more diverse. The default NES color palette provides very few tools to create a character with darker skin tones. This was especially problematic when doing the “Pixel My Face” Kickstarter rewards (at a certain pledge tier, backers are immortalized as portraits in the game) since we had backers from all corners of the earth. So our final cheater color is the light brown that gives shade to this fellow's face!

Number of Colors Per Sprite

Sprites on the NES were limited to 4 colors (or 3 colors + transparency) as you can see with the sprite characters in The Legend of Zelda screenshot on the right.

Some developers created more colorful sprites using another trick. Characters like Mega Man were constructed out of two sprites, one for his body (blue, light blue, and black) and one for his face (beige, white, and black), and the sprites were overlaid. This is why Mega Man’s face will flicker separately from his body sometimes. For Shovel Knight, we decided to treat most sprites like Mega Man, and give them 4-5 colors to work with in addition to transparency.

Getting this balance right was a tricky process, as a character with too many colors stuck out like a sore thumb. We worked back and forth with detail levels and colors until we found a combo that looked great.

A sprite too detailed is also really hard to animate!

  In this example, you can see the original King Knight design. While the left sprite has only 5 colors (as was our stated limitation), it was too detailed and almost felt closer to a 16 bit sprite. After taking a few passes to simplify the shapes for readability and simplicity, we ended up with the sprite that you see in game!

Multiple Color Palettes Simultaneously

Although every sprite in Shovel Knight is created using limited colors, we didn't make all sprites onscreen abide by a single color palette.  To cite Mega Man again as an example, the player's sprite color changes also affect 1-Ups and other items. This is due to a uniform color palette; when a color is adjusted for one sprite, all sprites change color. We chose to not worry about this limitation as the headache to make one palette work doesn't benefit gameplay, but we did use limited color palettes to create enemy variants and for cycling damage and explosion effects.

Those effects made gameplay more clear and exciting; for example, cycling damage made it obvious you were hurting an enemy as the effect was consistent across all objects and added fun as the color cycling was more impactful than your typical 'gethit' animation or flickering. These palette cycling and shifting effects were created by passing an indexed unsigned byte texture representing the sprite and a full 32 bit color texture representing the palette to a pixel shader...quite the leap from 8-bit technology to imitate the good old days!

To see the limits of palette effects, check out this site, which shows the amazing animations you can create by cycling a single color palette.

Memory Limitations

An NES cart could only hold so much information: code, animations, backgrounds, text, music, and everything else had to fit into 32k of memory, although this was expanded greatly through the use of on-cartridge chips called memory mappers, which became essential as more advanced graphics and special effects required ROM sizes as large as 4-6 megabits (0.5 ~ 0.75 MB). Shovel Knight weighs in at almost 1.2 gigabits (about 150 MB - most of which is .mp3s). Because we didn't have to fit onto a small cartridge, the extreme optimization and data compression required for that wasn't necessary, and we were able to focus our technical efforts on gameplay systems and stability.

Our composer and sound designer Jake 'Virt' Kaufman likes to remind us that the soundtrack, when compiled into authentic machine code (see below) will fit nicely into the 6 megabit Kirby's Adventure cartridge, but only if all graphics and gameplay code are removed first.

Big Sprites

The sprite hardware on the NES was not optimal for drawing very large moving objects, due to the limitations it imposed (after all, even a few small ones could cause flickering).  To get around this limitation, clever developers displayed big art as animated background tile layers.  That is the reason why, whenever you fight a large enemy on the NES, they are usually on a black screen with no background art. The boss is the background.

We thought that the black background with the huge boss always gave NES games a distinctive and epic feel, where the focus was just on you and your enemy, so we decided it was important to keep. However, lacking sprite limitations, we didn't need to mess with background layers or other workarounds to make a large sprite possible.  We simply used our animated sprite code, were careful with the designs, and made sure the sprite was on a black (or very dark) background.

Camera shakes

Shaking the camera to show a powerful rumble is a time-honored videogame effect. On the NES, camera shakes only occurred on a single axis. Pay attention next time you see Bowser smashing the ground in the final encounter in Super Mario Bros 3 . This has to do with the NES’s difficulties doing diagonal scrolling.  And this is something we broke, because we didn’t find a compelling reason to keep it.

HUD as a Layer

One oddity of NES games is that sprites usually draw in front of the HUD. On the NES, most HUDs were drawn on the background layer. This is because there was only 1 layer, so the background and HUD had to share. In many cases, the memory mapper chips that enabled large ROM sizes also contained special timing hardware to support "split screen" status bars, but the background layer was still just a background, and sprites were drawn over it. So, if the player was able to reach the top of the screen, the HUD would be covered up by their sprite. Occasionally, this behavior was used as a gameplay mechanic, as secrets or paths could be hidden in such "unreachable" screen space. We love this quirk, and stuck to it as best we could, but sometimes the layering got too weird, and we had to change a few instances on a case by case basis.

Sound Limitations

The music is probably the most authentically NES part of Shovel Knight, although it might seem more lush and full than you'd expect for a NES game. That’s because it is written to use a special memory mapper / sound chip called the VRC6, which was used in several Konami games toward the end of the NES era. This chip allows for advanced graphical techniques, but most famously adds 3 additional sound channels, giving the music much more richness and depth. However, external sound chips such as the VRC6 only worked on the Japanese Famicom, as the Western NES lacked the necessary cartridge connections, so it's an unfamiliar sound to most western gamers. Compare the music in the US version of Castlevania III with the Japanese release, Akumajou Densetsu; the difference is striking.

  Composer Jake Kaufman went about creating Shovel Knight’s music and sound effects using a freely available program called Famitracker. Famitracker exports music in NES machine code, which is capable of running on an actual NES or Famicom console, with all of its limitations and hardware quirks. We finalized the audio using mastering tools (EQ and compression) to give it some extra punch on today’s sound equipment, but avoided using reverb effects or stereo mixing, which would destroy the raw character of the sounds. Any echoes or special effects you hear are programmed note-by-note, the way they were on the NES.  Here's a video of Jake demoing the complexities of a couple tracks created in Famitracker for Shovel Knight.

Another limitation of the NES was that sound effects would often cause one of the audio channels to drop out.  The NES shared the same 5 basic channels for both music and sounds, so the SFX would temporarily steal one or more of the music channels in order to be played. This effect is not present in Shovel Knight - the sound effects are simply layered on top of the music, which is completely inauthentic, but much nicer to listen to.

The next time you boot up an NES game, though, listen closely and notice how most games will drop out the bass, drums, or harmony to the melody in order to pack in more sound effects.

When you add up all the changes, it seems like there is a vast gulf between Shovel Knight and the technology of the NES. However, we feel that the core of the aesthetics of the 8-bit era has been respected, and perhaps even enhanced!

Shovel Knight was a dream project, allowing us to explore a style of game that's rarely seen today. It was fascinating to try and problem-solve the technical issues of yesteryear while avoiding any pitfalls that would belie real modernity. We hope that by being true to the NES in more than just superficial ways, we've built fanciful rock-solid fundamentals.